Episode 3: The Confidante

Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. Just a quick note before we start. You're about to start listening to episode three in a six part series, so if you haven't heard the first two episodes already, be sure to go back and start there. You're gonna get a lot more out of it if you do. Also, just so you know, you can hear more ad free episodes from this season

She explained to me that.

She just got out of the Marine Corps and she needed help with some car payments because she was waiting for via disability to kick in.

She was very likable, she was very charismatic, and then on top of it, she was a veteran and badass and had these injuries.

We would kind of quietly make sure that when she was in our environment at the gym, she was protected.

So I call up our records keeper and I say, hey, I need a copy of her DD form two fourteen, and he said, ooh, she just left my house two hours ago. She came here to the house to come get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here.

So like here, right when I get up in the morning, I make it a point to go outside.

This is Sarah Kavanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing about for the past two episodes.

And like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look at the view because the view behind overlooks the mountains, and really enjoy that and just let that be the start of my day versus some of the intrusive thoughts about the past that would come up before, and I would let that dictate my day. So I've really changed how I let the past affect my moods, so I don't become just a continuous repetition of them.

Jess and I spent the better part of several days interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life now, and a great many other things too.

How we found her, where we found her. We'll get there. You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of the season, but for now, We just want you to hear some of the very first things that she said to us in person, so that you get to read on her just like we did. We started with small talk, like read any good books lately.

Right now, I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tart, which is interesting.

I had read.

Goldfinch The Goldfinch and I loved it, so now I'm reading this one and I'm really enjoying it so far.

This was just a few minutes into our first conversation. At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Cavanugh, what she'd done, about all the people she deceived and hurt. I had a pretty good picture in my head of who she was, and this this was not it. This woman, well, she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or the type of person you'd hope would be taking care of your grandma the senior citizen home. In fact, she told us working with seniors that was her first job.

So I was in undergrad working and an assisted living. I worked there for five and a half years, and I loved it. I did everything from serving in the dining room to running activities to housekeeping. I did anything they asked me to do to basically pay my rent and pay my tuition and kind of survive undergrad at all costs. But I developed really meaningful relationships with the residents.

Right as I sat there listening to her, I noticed Sarah was doing this a lot, ending a sentence by saying right, it's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you through her version of events. It's more like she was feeling around for things that we might have in common, and if we nodded along, she'd say right.

A lot of people don't like older people. I remember a lot of people I worked with who were like, she's grouchy, or she's.

This, or she's that, And.

I thought, well, they've had fifty years to practice.

Right type thing.

And also like I always think about our moods as a product of something else, right, I know that personally, and so I just think there was an appreciation there for me. But I didn't really know where that was going to go. I think I thought I was going to be like an activities director or something like that.

But instead she got our masters and became a social worker. Eventually she got a job at the local VA in Providence, Rhode Island, that was her job, helping veterans in some pretty tough situations. And this is one hundred percent true. By the way, many of these people coming to Sarah for help, they showed up, maybe on a Saturday, kind of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them at ease.

I would just say, hey, how are you like, it's Saturday, you know, what's how do you feel about this? How do you feel about being here? And if they were like, I really don't want to be here. I had to get up early and I had to drive to Providence, and I'd be like, yeah, I understand.

When her clients did open up. Sarah took this approach.

When someone said something like I'm you know, I'm struggling with I might be homeless, or my wife and I are fighting or something like that, I wouldn't respond with surprise. I would just be like, yeah, those things happen. Those things happen, and Okay, what do you think you need right now?

Because of that, what she.

Never wanted to do was send veterans elsewhere to some other program, you know, push them off on someone else.

I know that when I've opened up and told people things, if they've turned away from it because it makes them uncomfortable. I've then kind of thought, oh, this makes other people fee uncomfortable. I shouldn't talk about this, right, and I don't want to do that to them. But you have to be present in a way that silently says I get it.

When she talked about her old life as a social worker, I got this strange sense that I was seeing the Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because, let's be clear, the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time, they all loved Sarah, and listening to her talk, started to understand why she knew, in her own words, how to be present in a way that silently says I get it. It's weird to say, but I found her

I've always been told I'm a really good listener right, and I maximized that while I was lying right people, when you create space, people fill that space. And I had always been really I had always been able to kind of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and not share anything. I'd really learned that really well.

Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed, she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now, very different life, one in which she has a great deal of time to think about what she did and the people she hurt most.

I don't think it's ever going to be easy to think about the people I hurt, and because these are people that even before they knew I heard them right, I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.

And they were.

People I called every day, that I spent most of my weekends with, that they were my friends, some of them my best friends. And I think about that now, I mean, that's really hard.

When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone, a confidant who seems to get you and understand what you're going through, someone who listens quietly with what seems like empathy, But here in lies the danger. What if that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses

Last fall, Jake and I, along with our producer Amy, went on a road trip to Rhode Island. We wanted to meet the people in Sarah's inner circle, people who were closest to her, who each knew some part of the truth. One morning, Amy and I went to meet someone named Sam. We're just going to use her first name to protect her privacy. We spoke at her boyfriend's house, sitting around the kitchen table. Sam is in her fifties

She was really kind.

She definitely knew me, and she knew I think what I wanted to talk about.

Type thing, if that makes sense.

What was it that drew you to her, especially in those early yeadies.

It definitely was her intelligence. I mean her intelligence like just sparked something in me.

Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of twenty eighteen, just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point, Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told me about the moment when Sarah first came in for a consultation.

She was really quiet and reserved, you know. She answered questions but very kind of matter of fact. Definitely seemed like things were she was uncomfortable with, Like she didn't want me to look at her hip.

This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had always been able to quote keep her mouth shut and be quiet and not share anything, someone who let the silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had been injured in Iraq.

She said they hit an id and she got hit with the door that got blown in and hit her in the hit. She wasn't really limping this because this wasn't a brand new injury. This is something that had happened a long time ago, so it was more like a chronic thing.

Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus, she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past because one of Sarah's Jim buddies had connected them. Sarah got into a routine of twice weekly pt with Sam, and eventually the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it. Sarah was part of their Independence Program. It's super selective program for the most severely wounded veterans, usually people with

It was less than a year after they got married that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out and did they were separated, but she also said they did have an open marriage.

None of this was true, at least not according to Sarah's wife Nicole. At the time, they were still living together, still married, and not in an open marriage. But that's not what she told Sam. This, by the way, it's also classic Sarah, as we've learned, and it's a pattern I've seen with women's gammers in general. They often find emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma is totally made up. And it worked.

I think, like anything, basically, just.

You spend more time with someone and then you just appreciate who that person is, and then you find yourself wanting to spend more and more time. We just like enjoyed our time together and then it just turned into more and.

By more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from having a professional relationship to a friendship to a love affair one that was really romantic, started going on a ton of trips together.

Let's see, we went to Florida, we went to Vale, we went to the Bahamas. So we went to California and then like you know, little driving around New England type stuff.

And it wasn't just a fling. Their lives became really entwined. Much of this I actually learned from other interviews. Sarah would talk about Sam as her partner so much that it got really confusing for us as we reported this. There were times I would talk to someone for this story and they'd mentioned Sarah's significant other and I had to double check, who did you think was Sarah's wife? A woman named Sam or a woman named Nicole. Oftentimes

She told me that she had a twin who was also marine and died in combat, and then she had two older brothers and they were all like in the military. Wow, yeah, And she said that her dad was a two star general.

Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her about their marriage spats, or what they were dealing with at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One brother in particular was worrying Sarah, Joel. She told Sam that he was also a VET who now did private military contracting.

He decided that he was going to do this mission because they would make a lot of money for these missions.

Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission, got shot and ended up in a coma, and that her mom flew to the Middle East to bring him back to the US, but the doctors couldn't revive him. They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day, Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia. Now. I have to be the one to take him off of life support.

I said, I'll go with you, and this is gonna be a really hard thing.

I'll go with you. You know you can fly down there and you know I can support you. And she's like, no, no, it's fine, I'll do it. And she called me at two o'clock in the morning.

I'll never freak.

She called me at two o'clock in the morning and said that it's done and he was gone.

Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman dealing with all of these injuries and now this, And just to zoom out for a second, because it can be easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brother. This version of Sarah, the person with the big military family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw.

She was very very meshed into my life. She knew my family intimately.

Sam's mother has been battling stage three ovarian cancer for years. So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for treatment at Dana Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family, walk her mother's dog, and get this. While Sam was taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo, she was also doing the same for Sarah. Sarah had told her the cancer lie too, said she had lung cancer.

I remember crying in my practice getting bad news, but then I remember getting really really great news and then being able to tell her and that kind of stuff.

It was a big rollercoaster. It's awful. It was awful.

Yeah, there was a lot of emotional strife on my part, you know, a lot.

As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver. Sam was in Sarah's world twice over, totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January twenty twenty two, the moment when everything started to spiral out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may have lied about a great many things, including her service in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of having cancer. When the news first reached Sam, she was

Can you believe this? This is crazy?

Someone's making this up, you know, Like, why would they do this? Why would they make this up about her? This is insane.

Sam told Justin, I've seen years of medical documents, even her cancer diagnosis. There's no way Sarah's lying. How would someone even make that up? More after the break.

While Jess was meeting with Sam, I was just a few miles away meeting with Justin. He's the guy that Sam called to get a reality check when the rumors first started. Justin was one of Sarah's buddies from the VFW, and initially, like Sam, he was very much in disbelief. Even now, knowing everything he knows about Sarah, Justin still struggles to wrap his head around everything that happened.

I'll be honest, I was a little hesitant to kind of relive this, but I think now we're gonna tell a story. I think it needs to be told fully, and so that's why I'm here.

Justin is in his early fifties. He's fit, he looks like he could be part of a marketing campaign for Peloton or something, and he has this really disarming, gentle energy about him. It feels like an old soul to me. I wanted to talk to Justin for a whole bunch of reasons, but mainly because Justin's story. It's really compelling in its own right, which is probably why Sarah was

We weren't in a on a base called Taji, which is outside of Baghdad, and where we lived, we had this kind of compound area. It was about fifty yards from a burn pit. And at night the wind would shift and our whole living area was enveloped in what was a fog. You couldn't you could, You could barely see in front of you, a fog of what smelt like burning plastic every night.

This fog that Justin's talking about, it's really a miasma of smoke and fumes. It came from a burn pit, which is how the military disposed of waste in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like when you eat, there's no there's not there's no water to do dishes, So when you go eat, everything is off plastic and that all gets thrown away. They dig a big pit. They throw all this stuff, plastic, medical ways, batteries, whatever, into this giant pit. They throw jet fuel on it and they light it on fire.

Justin was responsible for nearly five hundred service members. Their safety was on his shoulders, and he and his leadership team were worried about the long term effects of the fog.

We knew this wasn't gonna be good, right, and the contractor kept claiming that they do They did air tests and it was it was, it was okay, But I didn't buy that for a second.

Then one day it all kind of came to a head.

My master chief and I actually drove out there to the burn pit because we just saw this thick black smoke coming out, and we're like, what the hell's going on? And we went out there and you know, just like yelled at the guy basically like, what the hell are you doing?

Justin says the contractor just shrugged and said, that's what I was told to do. No explanation, just business as usual. It would be more than a decade later before Justin learned the real consequences of those burn pits. By then, he was living in Rhode Island with his wife and three kids. He was happily retired from the military. All was good until he started to feel this small ache.

I felt like, what it was a slightly pinched nerve in my left chest. And you know, I exercise so I get pinched nerves and stuff for once in a while. So I'm like, oh, it'll just go away.

But it didn't go away, and eventually Justin's doctor at the VA suggested that he get a CT scan just to be safe. That's when they found the mass in his lungs. At first, the doctors told him not to worry, it probably wasn't anything too serious. I mean, he was so young, so healthy, so fit. But then he went to see a pulmonologist at the VA and learned he had stage four lung cancer.

It was a huge shock. I'm working out, I'm healthy, everything's going great, and then someone tells you you're about to die. I just like I couldn't wrap my brain around it. My wife was I just kind of like broke down.

Justin says his wife had always been his lifeline. Even so, this cancer diagnosis was uncharted territory for Justin and his family.

When you know you're dying, it's a very lonely thing. I mean, it's very comforting that I have a family around me and a wife to support me and everything, But at the same time, you're the one that's dying and you're the one going through this personally, and it feels like you're very much alone.

But he did have someone who seemed to get it at a personal level, and that was Sarah Kavanaugh. Sarah and Justin knew each other from the VFW. They've been close for several years, ever since Justin joined the Post back in twenty seventeen, and that whole time, Sarah herself claimed that she had been fighting cancer, lung cancer. Sarah claimed the cancer came from her military service. Claimed her vehicle had been hit by an ied and she'd inhaled

So I immediately went to Sarah thinking, Okay, well there's someone going through the same experience I am. I don't feel so lonely anymore. I was still scared, but what she was sharing, what her experience was someone who's already started this journey is telling me, you know, things are going to be okay. That definitely helped.

Sarah had always been a friend, but in this moment, their friendship seemed to take on a deeper meaning.

No one really was in my shoes except her. At least that's what I thought. Here's another veteran that's going through the same thing I'm going through, so at least she knows we can support each other. And then we started actually opening up more about our treatments and how our chiatments were going.

Sarah told Justin she was on an experimental dose of an immunotherapy drug and it was working, but according to Sarah, the VA was cutting back on her treatment. This story hit home for Justin. He'd faced his own bureaucratic roadblocks within the VA. In fact, he'd eventually gone outside the system to Dana Farber in Boston to get the experimental treatment that he needed and it seemed to be working, which gave Justin an idea.

I thought, well, Dana Farber's this amazing place and I know that they can help her. And I said, well, do you have private health insurance because you need to go to someplace like Dana Farber and get real help because the VA is not going to help you. And she said, well, I don't have or I can't afford it. She just kept saying like she couldn't. That was too much for her.

The whole thing was frustrating for Justin and he felt like he couldn't just sit there and do nothing.

We veterans look out for each other, and I'm not going to sit here and let a fellow what I thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from lack of treatment when I know there's an alternative if I can help it. So I said, look, I will at least begin by paying for this insurance for you to be able to go to and a farmer.

It was an incredibly generous offer which Sarah turned down.

She initially said no, I can't ask you to do that. No, no, no. But then she kept telling me that, you know, she wasn't doing well, and eventually, you know, I said, look, I don't want you to die.

At last, Sarah agreed. In the months that followed, Justin gave her money to pay for private insurance, over five thousand dollars in total, all in the hope that it would keep her alive. Then one day, Justin gets a call from Dave Ainslie at the VFW. You know, the guy with the handlebar mustache. He was the previous commander at the post before Sarah.

Dave told me like, hey, you know, like I got to tell you something about Sarah, and she's you know, she's face, she's not a veteran, and I was just in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain around it.

Dave explained how he tried to retrieve Sarah's discharge papers her d D two fourteen, and how Sarah had been one step ahead of him, absconding with the paperwork before Dave could get his hands on it. Justin says that he believed Dave, but part of him resisted, part of him was in denial. He kept asking himself, who would do something like this and why. Around this exact same time, rumors began to swirl about Sarah being a fraud, and

Sam and I talked on the phone and Sam was still in I think, still in denial, and said, this is not true. She actually does have cancer. I've seen the record, her medical records.

Because remember Sam, she'd seen all the proof, the wounded warrior enrollment forms, stacks of medical records. Someone claiming to be Sarah's VA caseworker had even sent Sam official documents, blood work, diagnoses, intake forms. It all looked legit. It was enough to give justin a moment of pause.

There was a little bit of a question in my mind. I'd say, she's actually seen medical records. What does that mean?

Like, was there some other explanation here, a story that made sense of it all, that turned the world right side up again and somehow transformed Sarah back into Sarah And if not, well, then so many other questions bubbled to the surface, like where did that stack of medical

In the days after that phone conversation with Justin, Sam still held on to the hope that maybe this was just some terrible misunderstanding. Sarah kept maintaining her innocence, saying she had the paperwork to prove it. Sam says she believed it, maybe because she wanted to believe it. At one point, Sam was driving to work and talking to Sarah on the phone about all of this. She got frustrated. She asked, Sarah begged her, really.

Where's the paperwork? And she's like, I can't find it. I'm like, what what do you mean you can't find it? You're the most organized person I know. And she's like then she said, it's all a lie. And I was like, wait, wait, were.

You ever in the middle terry?

And that's when Sarah finally said it a one word confession. No, she'd never been in the military.

I literally turned around and I was going to my work. I turned around and I went right to her house. What was that drive?

Like, I don't even remember. I don't even remember like that drive. I don't remember walking into her house. I remember sitting on her couch and like me, like telling her, asking her, is this real?

Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? You know? And she was like no, no, no, no no.

It was an avalanche of betrayals. The cancer, the military service, the family down in Georgia, the brother she'd taken off life support. None of it was true. Sarah had been lying to her every single day for years about nearly everything, even things unrelated to her soulen valor scam, like still being married to Nicole, and in doing so she had made Sam the other woman. We actually talked to Sarah about this very moment.

I remember her coming to my house and having that conversation and her sitting on the couch across from me and telling her the truth, like watching it hit her, you know, watching it overcome her. It was like watching her heartbreak, you know. And she started to cry and told me she couldn't do this and how could I do it?

And all of those things. Sarah had spent hours and hours with Sam and her family in their home, nursed the wounds of Sam's divorce, helped her find happiness again. Sarah hurt Sam in all of these intimate, profound ways, and then she made that pain dirty, shameful.

I'm still coping with it. Will it be upset?

Now?

Memories will come up and I'll be like, oh, did that really happen? And I think, probably not, it was probably a lie because I'll still.

Like be like driving or whatever, and then memory.

Will come and all they I'll be like, oh, I wonder how Brody's doing, like things like that, you know, like it's so crazy.

To me, Brody one of Sarah's fake brothers. Memories like this come back to Sam even now. And then there was the fact that Sarah was also Sam's patient, that she'd been getting physical therapy from her for years, and some of those bills had been paid for by a wounded warrior. That meant that the very basis of their relationship with a theft a crime. She sat on the couch confronting Sarah, the implications became crystal clear.

I was like, oh my god. I was like, you basically stole money. And I said to I, go, You're gonna go to jail, Sarah, And she's like, you.

Think next time on deep cover?

I said like Hey, we are at your house.

It's the police.

Are you in the house.

We need you to come to the door.

Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Tali Emlin, Additional production support by Sonya Gurwit.

Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.

Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking by Anica Robbins.

Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick, I'm Jess McHugh and I'm Jake Halper.

My co host Jess McHugh is currently researching a book on female con artists.